THE ‘80s A Special Report :...

“Rap is the TV station that black people never had,” Chuck D said a couple of years ago. The frontman for the political-rap group Public Enemy was referring to the art form’s ability to convey the unedited African-American experience to vast numbers of people in a country where the mass media are almost exclusively white-controlled, as in the way an N.W.A song tells black kids in South Carolina a little bit of what it’s like to be a black kid in Compton.

Rap entered the decade as something of a dog-and-pony act: lightweight novelty records by the likes of Kurtis Blow and the Sugar Hill Gang. (The first rap record wasn’t made until ’79.) Since then, rap has, among other things: 1) reduced pop music to its essentials of bare rhythm and words (starting with Run-DMC’s “Sucker MC’s”); 2) become the ultimate postmodern art form, a funky total-media collage (starting, on record at least, with “Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” (in rap, as T.S. Eliot said about poetry, mediocre artists borrow while great artists steal); 3) inspired multi-platinum singles that sound as if they were mastered off of the producer’s answering machine; 4) revivified classic R&B;, from James Brown to the Meters; and 5) become the sound track to the incredible late-’80s flowering of black culture, from Trey Ellis to Arsenio Hall to Spike Lee.

By now, rap is as diverse as rock ‘n’ roll itself used to be.

The Taste Makers project was edited by David Fox, assistant Sunday Calendar editor.